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The Word Order of Horace's Odes

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The Word Order of Horace's Odes proceedings of the British Academy, 93, 135-154 The Word Order of Horace’s Odes R. G. M. NISBET Summary. The intricate word order of Horace’s Odes is brought about by the repeated separation of adjectives from their nouns. Sometimes adjectives and nouns are interlaced in a pattern attested in Hellenistic poets and developed by their Roman imitators. As a result the force of the adjective comes over more sharply, and the structure of the sentence is more tightly integrated. The word order of the Odes conveys subtle shades of meaning, especially when a word’s place in the line is also considered: possessive adjectives and personal pronouns sometimeshave more emphasis than is recognized. A few points are added about Horace’s colometry: his Graecizing use of , participial and similar clauses to extend a period, his partiality ~ for prosaic ablative absolutes even at the end of a sentence, his transposition of words to a colon where they do not properly belong. But even his abnormalities follow a system, and though the mosaic is so artificial, he follows his own rules rigorously ’ without showing any constraint. 0 The British Academy 1999. Copyright © British Academy 1999 – all rights reserved 136 R. G. M. Nisbet Quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa perfusus liquidis urget odoribus grato, mha, sub antro? cui flavam religas comam, simplex munditiis? heu quotiens fidem 5 mutatosque deos flebit, et aspera nigris aequora ventis emirabitur insolens, qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea, qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem 10 sperat, nescius aurae fallacis. miseri quibus intemptata nites. me tabula sacer votiva panes indicat uvida suspendisse potenti 15 vestimenta mans deo. (Horace, Odes 1.5) THEFAMILIARITY OF this poem disguises its oddity. The vocabulary is normal enough, sometimes even a little prosaic (gracilis, emirubitur, vucuarn in a semi-legal sense, vestimentu); the constructions are straightforward there is ambiguity indeed in the words that refer both to the girl and the sea, but none of the off-centre use of language that makes Virgil so elusive. Yet though the components are simple, the composition is intricate: we can say with more reason than Lucilius ever could ‘quam lepide lexis compostae ut tesserulae omnes I arte pavimento atque emblemate vermi- culato’ (84-5 M.). A scrutiny of Horace’s word order may explain something about the character of his lyrics; it also reveals shades of emphasis that have received regular attention only in H. D. Naylor’s neglected commentary (1922). As situations recur, any study must deal with the Odes as a whole, but I shall revert from time to time to the ode to Pyrrha; when the composition of the individual poems is so carefully integrated, it is desirable as often as possible to look at the total context. The distinctive word order of the Odes depends above all on the placing of adjectives, which Horace, like the other Roman poets of his time, uses far more freely than prose writers. Though his lines tend to be short, he averages about an attribute a line (‘attributes’ include not just adjectives but participles); and as a rule the nouns with attributes consider- ably outnumber those without. Of course particular circumstances may distort the statistics: when a noun has a dependent genitive, it is less likely to have an attribute as well; and when three parallel nouns are joined by connectives, one at most is likely to have an attribute (as at 2.4.21 ‘bracchia et voltum teretisque suras’). When an ode is elaborate and picturesque, the incidence goes up (with 22 attributes in the 16 lines of the ode to Copyright © British Academy 1999 – all rights reserved WORD ORDER OF HORACE’S ODES 137 wb),but it declines in an austere poem like 4.7 (‘diffugere nives’) or a boring poem like 4.8 (‘donarem pateras’). All in all, Horace uses far more attributes than Greek poets even of the Hellenistic age, and it is not till we come to Nonnus that we find a comparable profusion (Wifstrand (1933: 80)). A poet’s adjectives, for the most part, are not simply objective (as in ius civile); so, though various factors may operate, they are usually placed before their nouns (Marouzeau (1922); Hofmann-Szantyr (1965: 406-7); Adams (1976 89)). What is more, 40 per cent of Horace’s adjectives are separated from their nouns (Stevens (1953: 202)); in the ode to Pyrrha this is always the case except for 12 fallaczk, and even that is in a different line from 11 aurae. Hyperbaton was a familiar feature of literary prose that becomes more abundant in the imperial period (Hofmann-Szantyr (1965: 69&1); Adams (1971)); but the Roman poets of the first century BC use it much more freely than contemporary prose writers. To some extent they are following the patterns of their Hellenistic predecessors (Van Sickle (1968))’ but they go much further. Part of the reason lies in their greater number of adjectives: that helps to explain why the Aeneid has less hyperbaton than the Eclogues or for that matter than Lucan (Caspari (1908: 80-93)). Other factors were the avoidance of homoeote- leuton (for which see now Shackleton Bailey (1994)) and the attraction of rhyme; for Greek poets were less averse to homoeoteleuton and less attracted by rhyme. Horace in the Odes often interlaces adjectives and nouns in a double hyperbaton: thus in the poem to Pyrrha we find 1 ‘quis multa gracilis te puer in rosa’, 6f. ‘aspera / nigris aequora ventis’, 9 ‘qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea’, 13f. ‘tabula sacer / votiva paries indicat’. Various sorts of interlacing are attested in Plato (Denniston (1952: 54-5)) and in late Greek prose, but Latin prose is much more restrained. Norden collected some examples in the notable third appendix to his commentary on Aeneid VI (1957: 3934, and others have been added (Goodyear on Tac. Ann. 1.10.1, Woodman on Vell. 2.100.1, Winterbottom (1977a and 1977b)); but prose parallels to the verse pattern are rare in the central period, at least when special cases are excluded (as when one of the attributes is a genuine participle). There is a striking early instance at Rhet. Her. 4.63 ‘aut (ut) aliquod fragile falsae choragium gloriae conparetur’; but as that comes from a quotation it may be the rendering of a Greek orator. At Cic. Phil. 2.66 we find ‘maximus vini numerus fuit, permagnum optimi pondus argenti’; but here permagnum picks up maximus, and optimi pondus argenti can be regarded as a single unit (cf. Caes. Gull. 5.40.6 ‘multae praeustae sudes, magnus muralium pilorum numerus’). There is a more unusual instance at Plin. NH. 10.3 ‘caeruleam roseis caudam pinnis distinguen- Copyright © British Academy 1999 – all rights reserved 138 R. G. M. Nisbet tibus’; but here the metrical cueruleurn roseis may suggest the imitation of a poet or at least the manner of poetry. For though so rare in classical Latin prose, this sort of interlacing is superabundant in the Roman poets of the first century BC and later. Norden attributed their predilection to the influence of rhetorical prose (cf. Rhet. Her. cited above); but in that case it is strange that the arrangement is not significantly attested in Cicero’s speeches or the declamations in the elder Seneca (though note Sum. 3.1 ‘miseri cremata agricolae lugent semina’). It is better to look for poetical origins for a poetical phenomenon (Boldt (1884: 90-6); Caspari (1908: 86-90)). The interlacing of adjectives is attested in Greek poetry as early as Theognis 250 dyhah MOUU~W65pa ~OUT+~VUW, and Pindar provides lyric examples, but they usually lack the symmetry characteristic of Roman poetry. Such symmetry appears occasionally in Hellenistic poetry (e.g. Call. H. 4.14‘I~aplou?roXh$v d~opiu- mTai t76aTos dlxv~v,6.9), and particularly in pentameters (ibid. 5.12 .rrhv.ra Xahivo+h.ywv i+pdv dnd UTO~~TWV,5.34); but among extant poets it is not common till Nonnus (Wifstrand (1933: 13940)), who is likely to have been influenced by Hellenistic rather than Roman prototypes. On the other hand interlacing appears abundantly in Catullus 62-68 (so also Cinna, FLP fr. 11)’ occasionally in Lucretius, more often in an innovating earlier poet, namely Cicero (Pearce (1966 164-6 and 299-301)). As both hexameters and pentameters naturally fall into two sections, this favoured a balanced distribution of adjectives and nouns (Patzer (1955: 87-9); Conrad (1965)); and as Latin hexameters usually have their main caesura after the first syllable of the third foot (rather than after the trochee as in Greek), this made it easier to deploy adjectives before this caesura. As the interlaced pattern was already established in Horace’s day, and was used by him both in the iambics and hexameters of the Epodes (2.15, 43,47; 16.7, 33, 55), it is not surprising that he extended it to lyrics. What then is the function of hyperbaton in the Odes? It is often pointed out that it adds ‘emphasis’ to the adjective (cf. Marouzeau (1922 112-18); Fraenkel (1928 162-8))’ but some qualifications are desirable (Stevens (1953); Dover (1960 32-4)). In the first place ‘emphasis’ in this context need not imply a raising or other modification of the voice: that might be superfluous in a language with a more flexible word order than English. In a complex sentence other factors may play a part, for instance rhythm in a prose writer (Quint. 8.6.62-7), metre in a poet. Sometimes there is a wish not so much to add emphasis to the adjective as to stow away less important words between the adjective and the noun.
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